Kallawaya: A "Secret" language for medicinal knowledge

The Kallawaya, herbalist healers whom I visited in Bolivia in 2007, cleverly anticipated the information age by half a millennium. They realized that although they could not restrict access to the specimens (nor patent the knowledge) of the thousands of medicinal plants they had discovered, they could encode their specialized knowledge in a secret, mixed language to be transmitted only within practitioner families and between males (e.g., (grand)father to (grand)son). Despite the 400+ year interlude since the fall of the Inkaempire, and the widespread use of the Quechua language in the community, the Kallawaya have preserved their secret language, maintained their elite position as healers that attract a national and international clientele and also achieved the (moral but not legal) protection of being recognized by UNESCO as part of Bolivia's (and the world's) intangible cultural heritage.

I'm very interested in the problem of intellectual property vis-a-vis small languages and the knowledge they contain. Western legal regimes have neglected to provide any protection for ideas that are not individually-attributable "eurekas", but rather bodies of collective knowledge worked out and passed down over millennia. The threat of bio-prospecting, so thoroughly exposed by the late Darrell Posey in his work, is that companies will swoop in and (legally) steal traditional medicinal knowledge possessed by indigenous peoples, profiting handsomely while paying them no royalties whatsoever.

Kallawaya is an excellent example of a language that could be patented for both its form and content, for the economic well-being of the community that invented it, and for protection against predatory pharmaceutical corporations that seek to exploit that knowledge without recompense.